Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer (31 page)

‘Don’t be afraid,’ Seppy said to me, and repeated, ‘don’t be afraid. . . We are all alive—every single one of us—in one form or other. . .yes. . . We are still alive. . .!’

I found her statement most bewildering, for in my dream I was jostling through dead bodies, stepping over them. But I felt immediately comforted, warm and happy. For a moment, I surfaced from this bizarre dream closer to the periphery of wakefulness, and remembered in my stupefaction, that on at least two occasions after Seppy died, I had pawned those bangles—to pay for some school requirement of Farida’s—and later redeemed them; finally, I had sold them outright to the same pawnbroker at Grant Road. How silly of me to forget about it, and worry!

Having thus reassured myself as to what had become of my mother’s bangles, I sank back into a deeply refreshing sleep.

It wasn’t until the late 1980s that an amateur ornithologist in
Bombay observed a steep decline in the population of vultures.

He was immediately denounced by Zoroastrian orthodoxy as an agent provocateur set up by the reformist faction to bring disrepute to an ancient system of corpse disposal that was immaculate in its efficiency, hygienic and, moreover, ecologically sound. Vested interests were behind such propaganda, they claimed, intent on fomenting dissatisfaction with the ancient system to replace it with such offensive alternatives as stinky, polluting crematoria. These vested interests actually had their eyes on the vast commercial potential of the valuable real estate of the Towers of Silence, which was held in trust for the community by the Parsi Punchayet.

By the mid-nineties, the issue had become a talking point in the small community of Bombay Parsis, especially as there was a visible reduction in flocks of vultures that congregated at the Towers whenever there was a funeral. There was an incident as well, in which a middle-aged Parsi woman, who had recently lost her own mother, entered the restricted space of one of the Towers and took photographs of half-eaten corpses in an advanced state of decomposition. The photographs, published by a Parsi tabloid, immediately caused a great furore.

They are fake, most Parsis claimed, shocked by the temerity of the woman. It’s so easy in this day and age of computers to execute such visual tricks, they said. We are not fooled. Besides, the rays of the sun, above all, are powerful enough to destroy any residual corruption—vultures or no vultures. The trustees, moreover, had installed three powerful magnifying lenses high atop skyscrapers around the Towers to catch the rays of the sun and aim them directly onto the steps of the Towers where bodies were exposed to the birds. Khurshed Nagirashni, the heavenly spirit of solar fusion, will do her cleansing work, they said, not to worry.

But on this point, I myself remain sceptical. With pollution and smog growing thicker by the day in Bombay, besides four months of cloudy, monsoon skies, how can the sun’s purifying power actually pulverize entire corpses, if there are no vultures left to aid it? Meanwhile, security has been heavily beefed up at the Towers, especially around its restricted areas, to prevent a recurrence of any such unauthorized intrusion. The culpable watchmen who allowed this outrage to take place have been duly sacked.

What is the truth, you ask? I confess I don’t myself know.

I am eighty years old now. My father, as I mentioned earlier, lived to eighty-six, hale and hearty until the end. But I am crippled by severe arthritis; and very painful, if intermittent, sciatica. I fear that my youthful excesses with alcohol—they continued until fairly recently, to be honest—are taking their toll. It’s months since I walked up to the Towers. I am hardly able to leave my quarters now. Once again, the trustees have been kind, and they continue to let me reside here in semi-retirement. I suppose they realize, too—or Rutnagar may have been consulted on the matter—I won’t be around for much longer anyway.

This may be my last entry. My commitment to keeping these notes is wearing thin. Even clutching a ballpoint pen and scribbling have become rather painful activities, you see. My sense of the chronology of events, too, has become rather muddled: I often find myself confused as to the correct sequence of historical events. I suppose it just doesn’t matter enough to me—which came first: the chicken or the egg!

For years, demographers have been giving warning of the dwindling numbers among Parsis. All that sound and fury, and contentious dialectic on the issue—with the usual stridency of disagreement between reformist and orthodox camps—about whether or not to permit conversion of non-Parsis into the community has remained unresolved. It’s a sad irony, I suppose, though pretty amusing as well: vultures have become extinct, even before Parsis could. A core element of our communal identity, a distinguishing feature of our ancient creed is lost. Three thousand years or more of a preciously revered tradition is at end because of a certain drug much used in veterinary compounds, which causes kidney failure in vultures that consume animal carcasses packed with it.

My quarters are just too far from the Towers for any stench of half-eaten rotting corpses to waft my way in the evening breeze. I can’t go up there to verify the claims made by some of the more raucous reformists. Perhaps I don’t want to find out.

But before I finally give up on these notes, there
is
something very much more important I need to set the record straight on: this account would remain incomplete if I didn’t. All these years I have regretted having no contact at all with Sepideh. A number of times in my notebooks I have remarked on the persistent frustration of my desire to sense her presence, see signs of her surviving spirit, find reason to believe she is somewhere out there, that I
will
communicate with her again, if not in life, then after my own death. Well, just a few days after my father died, almost thirty years ago, something remarkable happened that gave me reason for hope. In fact, though I’m old and ill, and probably won’t live long, it has given a whole new perspective to my sense of being alive; filled me with child-like anticipation for the near future. I don’t fear death any more, even look forward to its claiming me soon.

But why, you may ask, if it was so significant did I wait thirty years to put it down on paper? I have often asked myself the very question. . .

It took me that long, I suppose, to come to grips with what flies so completely in the face of rationality: to accept that there must be dimensions of being which coexist along with the one we yoke our precious credos of reason and logic to.

Only a few days after my father died, Vispy was given notice by the temple authorities to vacate the premises, and move Father’s personal effects out. A new head priest had been appointed, one Ervad Dhanjishaa Colabawalla, who would be occupying the quarters soon, the letter said, once they were cleansed and a certain purifying ceremony for new beginnings performed.

It was May, the height of a particularly hot summer. Vispy asked me if I would like to come and help him decide what to retain of Papa’s things and what to dispose of. Luckily for him, he had recently found an apartment, fairly close to his workplace in Parel, that he could rent. I hesitated, but somehow knew it was important for me to go. This was in 1966, many years ago. I didn’t feel so physically crippled then as I do now, and I was glad for the chance to revisit the place I had grown up in, though I didn’t expect to be allowed to roam about freely. The main temple area, of course, was out of bounds for me, but as far as my movements within the back quarters themselves went, no objections were raised. I didn’t know why I had come, but something drew me. Just memories, a desire to imbibe for one last time the air he had breathed, the objects he had touched, the mustiness and fragrance of my long-vanished past?

Vispy had already packed his own things in a suitcase. There was almost nothing here that didn’t belong to the temple. Beds, a couple of simple wooden cupboards, a writing bureau. I looked through the manuscripts in the cabinet of ancient liturgy that my father had prized so much, which he had inherited from his predecessor Dastoorji Kookadaaroo. Strictly speaking, I suppose, I could have argued that these were his personal property. But I had no use for them, and Colabawalla would find them more interesting, probably. In the final analysis, I suppose they were temple property. Besides, how was I going to remove a dozen bulky volumes from the premises without eyebrows being raised and questions asked?

Vispy offered me a folding pen-holder attached to an inkstand, which stood on the writing bureau. I wiped the dust off its long plastic platform with my fingers, touching it gently, caressing it. In that moment something happened. I became completely detached from my immediate surroundings. I could barely hear Vispy’s voice; he was saying something to me.

‘Take it, Phiroze, please. You should have something that belonged to Papa. . .’

‘No, no, no. . .
You
take it,’ I muttered, feeling suddenly dopey and faint, and very hot.

And once again, I was dazzled by the white heat of an inferno, a great blinding light. But this time, unlike on that previous occasion so many years ago when I lost consciousness and sent a corpse toppling off a bier, I felt only very hot, and completely withdrawn from my surroundings—disorientated. At the same time, though I was in a daze, my attention converged with single-mindedness on only one thing: the brown rectangle of a wooden drawer. It was as if that mahogany object with its ornate handle was pulling me to it.

As though in a trance, I gripped the brass handle and pulled the drawer smoothly out of the writing bureau and laid it on the floor. Then, with an uncanny precognition, an abstracted sureness of focus, I inserted my arm up to the elbow all the way into the back of the vacant cavity left by the drawer. I didn’t know what I was doing. There was something somnambulistic about my actions, as though I were acting out a dream. Yet my thumb found a precise spot in the top left-hand corner of the rear of the cavity. I pressed hard, and the false bottom of a secret compartment sprang open. I felt around, and found in it a smooth, square box which, I suppose, was what I was looking for.

‘What? What’re you doing there?’

Vispy had been speaking to me all this while, but only now I heard him.

‘What’s in that box, I’m asking you,’ he was almost yelling at me.

I opened it. There were two of them, side by side. The ruby earrings!

I hadn’t seen them ever before. I didn’t even completely believe Temoo when he told me about them. As far back as I could remember, I had never seen my father releasing the hatch on this secret compartment, nor had he ever shown me how to do it; so it was not some childhood memory that had suddenly engulfed me. It was quite simply amazing! How did I discover the earrings, and find them with such a weird ease, as though I was being guided by some unconscious or supernal knowledge?

‘They were Rudabeh’s earrings,’ I explained to Vispy, holding the box out for him to see. ‘Temoorus told me about them, but I didn’t believe him. He wanted them to go to Farida.’

‘Well, good thing, then, you found them. Just in time,’ he said reassuringly, ‘before we moved out of here for good. Imagine if we had left them behind in that desk; they would be lost forever. Can I look at them again. . .?’

‘They’re beautiful,’ he observed, taking the box from my hand. ‘Should be worth a fair amount, I would think. Of course, give them to Farida, please, they are hers. . . By rights, they should go to Farida.’

I slipped them into my trouser pocket, and with Vispy carrying his own suitcase, we left the Soonamai Ichchaporia Agiari—the small fire temple at the dead end of a by-lane off Forjett Hill Road, where many believe that miracles, when earnestly prayed for, are realized.